You Can’t Put A Price Tag On A TechCrunch Post | Hacker News Reader

You Can’t Put A Price Tag On A TechCrunch Post

techcrunch.com

27 pointsrjvir26 comments

This is irony at best. Techcrunch talking about journalistic integrity. Do you know Apple sponsors them to write in favor of them? Even Matt himself admitted this once on the comments. Techcrunch is one of the shittiest organizations there exists ever. They include so much bias in their posts, that they are a shame to the fair Journalism community.

I'm curious about the example of Apple sponsoring TechCrunch. Do you have a link to the comment?

I googled it, and the top results are neya saying the same thing in multiple other HN comments.

Thanks :) So Henry, do you still work for Techcrunch?

Actually I run a data center in Iceland.

Nice..Consider giving my start-up a discount please :)

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/03/the-swift-rise-and-sad-fall...

This is one that I can recollect of. There's another one that's pretty old but I can't seem to find it. Maybe they deleted it? Sometimes their comments are reset. Not sure why.

Seriously. The management/owners have financial interests in the majority of what they cover. And by "cover" I mean "advertise for".

Amusing url for the story... http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/08/we-are-worth-at-least-3k/

I was about to mention the same, kind of ironic isn't it. Saying You can't put a price tag while their Url is saying give us more than 3K and we will think about it.

I think it's reasonable to just interpret it as a joke.

> "Imagine somebody doing this to The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times."

You mean like every major PR agency ever?

My startup was on TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/11/appifier-launches-new-servi...) and I'm happy to say that we didn't spend a dime for news coverage. Never have, and really never will.

Like pretty much everyone here, I have big issues with paid placement in the press because it makes reading news that much more boring and really takes away from all the people working hard to do cool things that actually matter.

If you're even considering paying for press, know this: press will not turn your company into an instant success story. Only customer development, understanding your pain points and solving them exceptionally will. PR is not a sustainable and effective customer acquisition strategy in the majority of cases (however it does feel really, really good)

Liesl Barrel, a trained actress is one of my friends and advisors. She's a natural at attracting attention to what she's involved in. She gave me one solid piece of advice that sums up our entire PR strategy: "Do something interesting, tell somebody abou it."

If you're doing anything more than that, whether it's kickbacks to a blogger or paying a PR firm to put you on the newswire, you might need to seriously rethink why you're even chasing the press.

Which raises the bigger question: is a Techcrunch post worth $750?

I consider that to be insanely cheap. It would cost you almost double that to sponsor one high profile tech meet-up in London and a techcrunch piece would drive infinitely more traffic as well as more credibility.

Yes it would drive credibility. It would drive it away.

FTA: $750 = TechCrunch pay-for-pitch targeting vs. $400 = any other blog pay-for-pitch targeting

A percentage cliff that steep seem like an indication of content saturation and price competition by amateur entrants vs. a calculation of value with backing metrics.

We’ve since proved that this is in fact true, and that a couple of our writers were on the receiving ends of these “pay for play” sorts of pitches.

-- Unfortunate wording; without an explicit denial.

Also note that the article never states that those caught taking money for writing articles will face any consequences. Sleazy stuff, but who expects any better from TC?

Err..what I understood from this article is that the PR firms were getting paid to get their clients into TC. They probably did this by cultivating relationships with the writers. It doesn't say that any of the writers were bribed.

PRServe posted a response on their website, http://www.prserve.com

That is a terrible terrible front (only?) page

It is a terrible front-page ( minus marks for also having a apology / hostile article as the first bit of copy vs. copy of what the company actually does) --(double minus marks for writing it in copy that's barley legible because of color).

As for the issue at hand though, I've talked to a lot of marketers and PR people who specialize in getting up and coming businesses covered - many of them get the job done - they also charge monthly fees and bonuses for landing the top ten blogs in specific niches.

These guys are a relatively new firm - the pay-per-results model is definitely welcome though in an industry that doesn't always show results for the expense put out (and therefore isn't used by most startups).

Interesting coincidence especially I read this post a few days ago. Kinda deep towards the end.

"TechCrunch, Facebook, and journalistic bias: http://www.numair.com/2012_09_tc.html "

I've only met Numair once, but he's repeatedly seen patterns in the world that don't come to fruition for several years.

He's well ahead of his time; a visionary.

Really cool to see he's writing again!

I'm not so sure; it says he's writing regularly, but that's his last post on the website.

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